To standardize Industry 4.0, semantic interoperability is considered as a key to secure communication that has no longer a vision from the field device to the cloud but can be implemented with OPC UA in reality.
The full form for OPC UA is Open Platform Communications United Architecture which is a standard in data exchange in industrial communication i.e. machine-to-machine or PC-to-machine communication.
The manufacturer or application system supplier had an independent open interface standard where the respective software was programmed in a particular programming language and the application was working on a particular operating system.
The previous version was working with machine data that not be transported but can be semantically described in machine-readable form. The data were assessed by OPC UA which enabled various types in both vertical and horizontal directions.
OPC UA components are directly integrated with a particular spectrum range on devices, controllers, machines and systems, gateways, or even to servers that are aggregated.
Source:- Elektronik Praxis